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Dr. Haime koren
On October 23, the United States, Israel, and Sudan issued a joint statement on normalizing relations between Khartoum and Jerusalem. This step follows the peace accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain and helps cement the fledgling regional axis that presents Israel as a highly valued ally rather than a vilified enemy. Time will tell to what extent this step will help the Sudanese caretaker government to overcome its internal differences and reach the 2022 elections as a functional and effective body.
Before gaining independence in 1956, British-ruled Sudan had good relations with the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine and later with the State of Israel. Khartoum did not participate in the 1948 war, and prominent figures in its leadership were in contact with Israeli officials in the early 1950s. However, after independence, when Sudan was influenced by the extremist pan-Arab politics of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Israel turned its gaze to the mostly Christian South Sudan, whose quest for autonomy had sparked a bloody civil war even under British rule.
The beginning of practical relations between Israel and the south was in 1968, when Prime Minister Golda Meir agreed to dispatch Mossad agents to the region in an attempt to weaken Sudan’s support for Nasser’s pan-Arab policy, he said. Among others in the infamous “Three Nos” of the Khartoum Summit of September 1967: There is no peace with Israel, there is no recognition of Israel and there are no negotiations with Israel.
In his meeting with rebel leader Joseph Lago, Meir said: “If you have the opportunity to reach a peace agreement with the north, we will not stand in your way.” Indeed, the rise to power of Ja’far Numeiri in a 1969 military coup set in motion a reconciliation process that three years later culminated in a peace treaty that preserved Sudan’s territorial integrity while accepting the southern demand for autonomy. regional.
Due to increasing political and economic difficulties, Numeiri was forced to request sharia law throughout Sudan, including the southern part. This, in turn, led to the resumption of the North-South war in 1983. South Sudan finally gained independence in July 2011 and soon after signed a peace agreement with Israel.
Interestingly, despite his political difficulties, Numeiri supported Anwar Sadat’s peace policy and even secretly assisted in the transport of Ethiopian Jews to Israel via Sudan in the early 1980s. However, the rise to power of Omar Bashir in a military coup in 1989 greatly intensified the Islamization of the regime under the influence of Hassan Turabi, who had also led Numeiri to apply sharia, with Khartoum becoming a central pillar of the Islamist terrorist axis.
In 1991-93, Sudan provided patronage and a base of operations for Osama bin Laden and many al-Qaeda terrorists who were forced to flee Saudi Arabia. It became a close ally of the Iranian regime, as well as a major source of supplies for Hamas, Hezbollah, and other terrorist organizations in Somalia and Yemen. According to foreign sources, Israel has repeatedly disrupted arms deliveries to terrorist groups, including the destruction of a convoy of trucks carrying Iranian missiles to Hamas (January 2009) and an attack on an Iranian weapons ship in Port Sudan.
After the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant in July 2008 against Bashir for crimes against humanity (and later genocide) committed in Darfur, where between 350,000 and 500,000 men and women were killed in 2003-05 Bashir’s adviser told the US Ambassador in Khartoum that “if things go well with the United States, maybe he can help us with Israel, his closest ally.” This was the first time that the establishment of relations between Israel and Sudan was raised as a distinct possibility, although that did not stop the regime’s support for the “axis of terror”, thus transforming Sudan into a stage for a covert war between Israel and Iran. In October 2012, for example, Israeli fighter jets attacked an arms factory near Khartoum that belonged to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, a factory that produced long-range Shihab missiles and other weapons to smuggle into Gaza and Lebanon. .
With Sudan subsequently joining the Saudi-led coalition of Sunni Arab states, indications about possible establishment of relations with Israel were renewed. In January 2016, Foreign Minister Ibrahim Ghandor was quoted as saying, “The question of normalization of relations with Israel can be examined” in exchange for the removal of US sanctions on Khartoum. In response to the media firestorm caused by these comments, Bashir explained that he had been “advised to regulate his relations with Israel” to alleviate Sudan’s difficult economic situation.
These insinuations, which were likely intended to signal to the West the seriousness of Sudan’s intention to abandon the “axis of evil,” were supported by opposition figures who believed that “there is no justification for Sudan to show hostility to Israel and pay a policy and cheap price for it. ” Opposition cleric Yosef Koda, for example, argued that Islamic law allowed for normalization of relations with Israel and that Sudan should do so, while Foreign Investment Minister and Umma Party leader Mubarak Fadel Mahdi said in August from 2017: “There is no problem with normalization with Israel. “(In doing so, he came full circle, as he is a relative of Umma Party leader Sadeq Mahdi, who was the first Sudanese leader to meet with Israelis in the 1950s).
After the 2019 coup that toppled Bashir, an interim government was established to rule the country in the run-up to the 2022 elections as an uneasy compromise between the will of the people to see the end of military rule and the ability of the military. to hold on. to the levers of power. President Abdel Fatah Burhan and his deputy Muhammad Hamdan Deklo, both army generals, are powerful remnants of the old regime, while Prime Minister Abdullah Hamduk and Chief Justice Na’mat Abdullah Muhammad Khair must represent the will. of the people as high civil representatives. promote reform and change.
The Provisional Government suffers from internal disagreements on a variety of issues and constant attempts by the military to seize power, but it was the only way out of the post-coup stalemate. As such, it received the blessing of the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as that of the United States and most of Europe.
Internal disputes within the provisional government produced different approaches to normalization with Israel. While Burhan and Deklo lobbied in this direction to improve Sudan’s international standing and remove it from the US list of state sponsors of terrorism, Hamduk opposed the move mainly out of fear of antagonizing public opinion.
The Entebbe meeting in February 2020 between Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Burhan, at the invitation of the President of Uganda and the orchestration of US Secretary of State Pompeo, was a significant step forward in normalizing relations between Sudan and Israel and was accompanied by numerous publications from Sudanese sources on the imminence of normalization. Indeed, on October 23, the United States, Israel, and Sudan issued a joint statement on normalizing relations between Khartoum and Jerusalem. This step follows the peace accords between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain and helps cement the fledgling regional axis that presents Israel as a highly valued ally rather than a vilified enemy. Time will tell to what extent this step will help the Sudanese caretaker government to overcome its internal differences and reach the 2022 elections as a functional and effective body.
Dr. Haim Koren served as Israel’s first ambassador to South Sudan and as Israel’s ambassador to Egypt. He is a professor at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center.
